During my last earn-out, after the honeymoon period, the bureaucracy piled up very quickly. To take an extreme example we hired a rather insecure engineer who

During my last earn-out, after the honeymoon period, the bureaucracy piled up very quickly. To take an extreme example we hired a rather insecure engineer who proclaimed himself a "UDP expert", and successfully petitioned management to put in place a rule that anyone wishing to implement even the simplest piece of UDP code must talk to this guy before every commit for his stamp of approval (the result being that the rest of us tended to stick with TCP even when UDP might have been a better choice). My first day at justin.tv was quite a contrast. Justin and Emmett pretty much just said "go implement a very scalable chat system - the one we have right now is breaking. And try not to interrupt anyone if you can, we're all very busy". That was quite a breath of fresh air.